Deeplinks Blog posts about Anonymity

In Armenia, online anonymity could be a luxury of the past if a bill that is currently before the Armenian parliament is passed. The bill would make it illegal for media outlets to publish defamatory content by anonymous or fake sources. Additionally, under this bill, sites that host libelous comments that are posted anonymously or under a pseudonym would be required to remove such content within 12 hours unless an author is identified.

[Accessing] any part of a computer system without right. Cyber-squatting. Cybersex. Computer-related forgery. What do these things have in common? They are all punishable acts under Philippines’ Cybercrime Prevention Act.

When a group of students from Iowa State University (ISU) contacted us earlier this month about forming an ISU Digital Freedom group, they were facing an unexpected problem: despite their simple goal of fostering a healthy conversation around freedom-enhancing software, the university administration denied them official recognition. The university has since granted the Digital Freedom group the green-light to meet on campus, but under unduly restrictive conditions. These students’ story is instructive to students around the country and the world who are concerned about online privacy.

Just in time for Halloween, the Washington Post has brought us a horror story about U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies reading massive amounts of private data directly off of the internal communications infrastructure of U.S. Internet giants Google and Yahoo.

The Post's report reveals that the spy agencies tapped into the internal, private fiber-optic links between the companies' data centers. This gave the spooks a view into corporate and customer data moving between data centers—data that the companies likely didn't encrypt because they viewed these dedicated private links as secure. That means that the private communications of millions of ordinary users, both foreign and domestic, were exposed to surveillance by the intelligence agencies.